The Rise Of Ransom City Part 24

Despite my best efforts we made progress.

An experiment with an early prototype of the Bomb cleared a whole city block of abandoned slums, but destroyed the Apparatus in doing so, and the effect could not be repeated. It was judged still too unpredictable for regular military application. I hear the Engines themselves gave the matter their attention.

I said before that the engineers that they gave me were no good. That was just bl.u.s.ter. The engineers of the Line were very good. All the resources of the Baxter-Ransom Trust and of the Line were behind my work. It was all I could do slow it down even a little. Often I forgot that I was trying to slow it down. The laboratory was a terrible temptation.

You may recall the ghost I called Jasper, who visited me in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Ormolu Theater as I worked on the Apparatus. A similar phenomenon repeated itself in the Baxter-Ransom Tower. This time it happened on a ma.s.s-production scale.

Like I said, I worked in the bas.e.m.e.nt beneath the Tower. A whole floor of labyrinthine corridors and echoing windowless rooms had been given to me, and a couple dozen engineers in black coats. We filled the rooms with the wild rotating and humming machinery of the Apparatus.

There were, to be precise, twenty-three engineers working in those rooms at the time when the phenomenon began to repeat.

One of the foremen came to me and said, "Sir- I don't know how to say this, exactly- but there are too many engineers, sir."

"I've always said that myself."

"No, sir- Ransom-you should see this, sir. It's- peculiar, sir."

I followed him. There were, as he observed, twenty-six persons gathered in or at the door to Room Nine, not counting myself. Twenty-six engineers stood nervously by the door, while three supernumerary persons stood in Room Nine. They were dressed like engineers, but, the foreman explained, n.o.body recognized them and n.o.body knew by whose authority they had been admitted into the bas.e.m.e.nt. So far as anyone knew, they had simply appeared, in a moment when n.o.body had been looking.

The three of them stood facing the Apparatus. Their backs were to us, and we could not see their faces clearly. All three of them had their hands up before them in various positions suggesting surprise or alarm.

They said nothing and moved little and had a vague and indistinct appearance.

It does not do to look yellow in the presence of your men, so I entered Room Nine, and walked briskly toward the three and spoke to them in a no-nonsense manner.

"What are you doing here? Did Lime send you? I don't need any more of you people, I can hardly take a step here without tripping over some incompetent- are you listening to me? Do you know who I am?

Answer when I speak to you. Listen-"

I put my hands on one fellow's shoulder and instantly all three of them retreated- or I should say they receded- their feet not moving nor their hands, their mouths still half-open as if about to say something, all three of them very rapidly leaving backwards through the metal door to Room Nine and taking a sharp turn left to disappear down the corridor. I heard one of the real engineers curse. I cannot describe what it was like to touch that phantom.

There were more of them over the weeks that followed. By no means all of them looked like Line engineers. There were men, women, children. They appeared without warning, the same way Jasper used to, they said nothing, they disappeared. Some of them looked like soldiers of the Line and one or two looked like long-dead Agents I recognized from ill.u.s.trations in the story-books. There were ladies in the fine gowns of the Delta baronies and there were hunched-over miners and there were red-faced ranch-hands from out on the Rim. There were Jasper City office boys with rolled-up sleeves and Keaton toughs and feather-bedecked Log-Town dancing girls and very old women in black who could have been from any place, any time. Not all of them had expressions of panic. Some of them stood all day in the same spot in a corridor, staring at a crack in the wall. The ones who didn't move were scarier than the ones who did, though you would think it would be the other way around. At first the phenomenon of the phantoms scared some of the engineers so bad that they could not work, and that pleased me a whole lot, but after a little while they got used to it. It is remarkable what you can get used to.

There were phantoms in fancy old-time wigs like Jasper used to wear. Some of them had an ever older look about them, with the tall hats and b.u.t.toned-up coats you see in history-books about the very first pioneers to cross the frozen mountains and settle the West- every one of them had the stern expression of a judge, pa.s.sing sentence.

As time went by more and more of the phantoms were Folk, some of them in chains, most of them not- tall, finely painted, long-limbed, sometimes beautiful.

All the history of the West was there! We should have sold tickets.

Eventually the phenomenon spread beyond the bas.e.m.e.nt and into the upper floors of the Tower, causing panic among the office clerks and secretaries. For a week a phantom man of the Folk stood in Elevator Six all day, splendidly painted, glaring in an accusatory way at anyone brave enough to get in with him, of whom there weren't many. He could not be moved.

One time I woke in the middle of the night in the old man's four-poster bed to see a figure staring at me from by the moonlit window- I would swear on what's left of my honor that it was Mr. Carver. As I ran to embrace him and apologize the window blew open and Mr. Carver vanished like he was swept away in the wind.

Until that moment I think I had imagined, without ever thinking about it, that the phantoms were men and women of bygone days. I had imagined that they were the long-dead, let back into the world by the holes the Process opened- or that the ghosts of the dead were always with us, and it was only by the light of the Process that they were visible. The strange thing was that though I knew for sure that Mr. Carver was dead, seeing him there made me sure he was no ghost, and therefore none of them were, but rather they were people who might have been, and might one day be, in a world that was made differently, and maybe better.

Well, who knows how strange things would've gotten or what other insights I might have had if we'd stayed much longer in that place.

There was unrest throughout the Tri-City Territory, and everywhere else as well, and the Line's forces were overstretched and more paranoid even than usual, and so it took a full nine months for them to lay tracks between Harrow Cross and Jasper City, and to build a Station in Jasper fit to house an Engine.

They constructed it where the old Senate building had stood. They laid tracks right across the city, behind a barbed-wire fence, cutting streets and neighborhoods right down the middle. They built a new bridge. As for the Station itself they built it twice as tall as the Senate had been and three times as wide at the base. It was made all of polished stone and black metal and smoke and it was heavy-shouldered like a vulture. It made a h.e.l.l of a noise at all times of the night and as it settled itself in it spread out, swallowing squares and parks. Inside there was a maze of corridors and a cavern they called the Concourse, that was big enough to hold an Engine and full of echoes and shadows and shafts of electric-light and foolhardy pigeons. The stone walls were thick as a mountain and built at the Baxter-Ransom Trust's great expense but they started to crack anyhow, the first time an Engine showed up in town.

It was the Kingstown Engine, the one that I'd seen back in the swamp all that time ago. Of course I was among the a.s.sembled Jasper City dignitaries there to greet it. I can't say I had any great enthusiasm for shaking hands and making conversation with an Engine of the Line but it beat another day with the phantoms.

I stood for three hours waiting behind a black railing, between a white-haired old Senator and the man who had been appointed to replace Mr. Carson at the Jasper City Evening Post, whose name I forget, and we all tried to keep our faces calm as the Engine approached- steam first, then noise, then shaking, then a wave of heat that made the skin of your face go tight, then finally the shape of the thing itself getting bigger and bigger, until it is so close and so big that you cannot believe it is real. The Senator's nerve broke and he turned his face away. I did not.

Behind me and the Senator and the newspaper man and the other a.s.sembled great and good of Jasper there was a huge ma.s.s of men press-ganged from all of Jasper's factory floors. They were all supposed to remove their hats in unison but I guess in the general panic some men jumped the gun and others froze, and there was whispering and shoving and then as the Engine loomed closer and closer there was a sound of panicked moaning- it reminded me of the Yards at slaughtering-time-but I still did not turn my face away from the Engine.

The Engine brought with it about seven hundred soldiers of the Line and more guns and wire and concrete than I can imagine anyone had any use for. If it still bore scars from what ever injury it had sustained that night in the swamp, I couldn't see them, but of course it was a mile long and kind of battered and dusty in places, and the far-off parts of the Concourse were in shadow. It sat and steamed while a ceaseless stream of soldiers silently de-boarded.

My adjutant gave me the signal that I should make my speech, so I stood up straight and approached the Engine, climbing the steps of a temporary scaffold so that I stood beside it, nearly as tall as it was.

It had no face, only a great black metal mask. I wonder if it knew who I was.

I cleared my throat, and forgot what ever I was meant to say.

The Engine was still as a mountain. Heat poured off it.

"Gentlemen of Jasper," I said.

Because I never got to say what ever I was going to say I could, if I liked, tell you that I intended to make a speech of heroic defiance- one that would make my adjutant's spectacles steam up- one that would tell the Engine exactly what it was, by which I mean that it was a monster, the nightmare of a bad few centuries, a thing that had no place in the new and rapidly-changing century to come- a speech that would give them no choice but to replace me.

Maybe I would have. Who knows?

I took a deep breath and I turned away from the crowd to face the Engine itself and I said, "Well-"

I was interrupted by the noise of a gunshot, and pain.

I guess it is because I turned when I turned that the gunman in the crowd only got me in the shoulder, not the heart. It hurt like a son of a b.i.t.c.h anyhow and I dropped like a stone to the floor of the scaffold and for a few moments I did not know what had happened.

I lay on my back. I rolled over to the edge of the scaffold and looked out over the crowd, in the middle of which a very large and very complicated kind of fight had broken out. Among the ma.s.s of men in gray and black waves and currents and whirl pools were forming. There was shouting and more shooting and men standing back-to-back and rallying others around them, though I could not tell who was who or what side they were on from where I lay. Sometimes a man in the crowd fell over and a s.p.a.ce cleared around him and then was filled again. From my alt.i.tude and with my head throbbing as I bled on the scaffold it was hard to tell uniformed Linesmen from Jasper City factory workers.

After a minute or two of this the Engine quite suddenly lurched into motion, with no warning except a terrible screech, as jets of steam erupted all along its length. It was as if its mind had been elsewhere all that time but now it had fallen back with a thump into its body, like a man sitting down in a motor-car. It seemed to expand and then contract as it began to move backwards out of the Concourse. Its sudden movement caused the scaffold to sway- the floor beneath me tilted- struts snapped and bolts shot loose- and I rolled back away from the crowd, bouncing on my wounded shoulder, and I rolled right off the scaffold, catching myself only at the last moment, hooking the elbow of the arm I hadn't been shot in around one of the teetering metal struts.

The arm I'd been shot in was no use and so I could neither pull myself up nor climb down. Instead I just dangled there over the hard & distant floor of the Concourse and watched the Engine slowly move.

I believe it was retreating. Retreat does not come naturally to its kind and you could tell that just by looking at it. Connecting and coupling rods like the arms of giants bent backwards and strained to move wheels bigger than my father's house. It would have been faster maybe but for the fact that it was still loading and unloading all along its huge body and as it lurched back Linesmen fell from broken planks and rolled beneath its wheels- trolleys spilled cargo, and a lot of it was concrete or canned food or rifles but some of it was rockets, and some of those went off, at 60 yards down the length of the Engine, 160 yards, 300, one by one lighting up the shadows of the Concourse.

I swung my legs until I was able to catch my foot in a cleft between two struts, and then I tried to kick myself up onto the platform again. When I got my head up I saw that a man had broken from the crowd and was running up the steps of the scaffold- well he was not so much running as he was climbing and jumping. He wore a flat cap and a scruffy beard and a brown jacket and he carried a big red rock in his hand. As he pa.s.sed me he kicked my arm, not quite hard enough to dislodge me- but then I guess he had bigger game in mind.

With a cry of, "The Red Valley Republic lives again!" he stood before the Kingstown Engine and he lifted the red rock over his head in both hands.

Nothing immediately occurred. In fact he had time to continue his speech, saying something about the rights of man and the future and freedom and peace and the little fellow.

Believe it or not I think I knew him- before the Battle of Jasper City he'd been employed by the Jasper City Evening Post as an editor of some kind, and I had met him in the company of Mr. Carson. But that's by the by.

Nothing continued to occur. He lowered the rock and held it in his hands and looked at it like it was very puzzling to him. Then he looked up and into the Engine's black mask, bigger than a barn, as big and round and blank as the face of the clock on the famous Territorial Tower that used to stand in Juniper City.

I guess I was born without much of a sense of danger but it is a muscle like any other and I had given it years of exercise. I did not know what was going to happen but it seemed to me better to take my chances with the drop than stay where I was.

I let go. As I fell backwards through the air the Engine screamed and a big cloud of gray-white steam emerged from its vents and swallowed up the whole scaffold, stripping paint and warping wood and boiling that poor fellow right where he stood, rock in his hand.

I had the good fortune to land on an Officer of the Line. I broke my hip-bone but I was otherwise unharmed.

The Kingstown Engine withdrew from the Station, gaining speed as it went. In another few minutes it was gone entirely, leaving only smoke and heat behind. The fighting continued on the Concourse for a while but I was picked up by two Officers of the Line and taken to what they called safety, and I called captivity. With my hip-bone and shoulder broken there was little I could do except hang there with my arms around their shoulders and go where they steered me.

I said, "Who are they? Who are these people- what's going on- wait, hold on-"

I still do not know who they were. There were at least one hundred of them and my best guess is that most of them were working men from the factories and Yards of Jasper City, and that what ever connection they had to the Republic was only in their heads. That's all I can say.

Anyhow after that incident the authorities of the Line decided that Jasper City was too dangerous, and so they relocated me to Gibson City, and then six weeks later to Harrow Cross, along with Old Man Baxter's triplicate typewriter and my adjutants and all the engineers and the prototypes and in fact the entire Ransom Project, by which I mean the Bomb.

CHAPTER 30.

INFORMATION.

Too much has already been written about the sounds and the smells and the sights of Harrow Cross, oldest and biggest and foremost of the Stations of the Line- you could make a heap of words as tall as its tallest spike- I do not have the time or the inclination to add to that heap. The Official Statistical Digest of the Surveyors of the Line boasts of the Station's size and power- Harrow Cross is to Jasper City as Jasper City is to East Conlan. There is nothing bigger than it. It is as far as you can go in that particular direction. The mad poetess Miss Hermosa Goucher of Keaton City wrote a poem about the place called "The Scream" and though she never visited it but only saw it in a dream, I hear her poem is well-regarded, if you like that kind of thing- I must warn you though that it does not rhyme. Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson stayed for three months in 1874 in a hotel on one of the sky-sc.r.a.ping upper levels above the smog, and later he wrote a book about it called On the Men Who Toil in Darkness, that was banned in Line territories but I hear it sold pretty well elsewhere. I don't reckon much changed in Harrow Cross between 1874 and when I was there except that the smog level rose to engulf Mr. Carson's hotel and the thing was converted into tenements. I recommend it to you, the same way I recommend all the works of my friend Mr. Carson to you. May he write kindly of me when I am gone!

The Agent Jim Dark wrote an account of how one time he stole into the Station and fought through its labyrinth of lightless tunnels and wrestled with gas-powered pistons with his bare hands and outwitted an Engine in its lair and escaped in a stolen aircraft. It is called How I Fought in the Great War, and officially it is banned in the remaining territories of the Line, but in reality it is freely available as an example of how everything the Line's enemies say is lies and bulls.h.i.t and self-flattery.

Old Man Baxter himself or whoever wrote his Autobiography sang for many pages the praises of Harrow Cross's pistons and steam and smoke and industry and how every man there was sorted into his proper place, some at the top and some at the bottom, according to their nature. I am ashamed to say that when I read those pages as a boy I thought only about what it was like at the top.

This morning we saw the trail of Heavier-Than Air Vessels overhead, criss-crossing, hunting. Miss Fleming was the first to notice the trails but I saw them clearly enough. They are fading now, which I guess means that the Vessels have moved on, or returned to their base to report. Back in Harrow Cross the sky was always dark with smoke but out here it is a very strange sight.

They moved me from Jasper City to Harrow Cross by motor-car, under light guard, for reasons of secrecy. Ordinarily dignitaries such as myself would have been moved by Engine, but from the gossip of the officers who drove me and guarded me I learned that the Engines were no longer considered safe. The Engines themselves were targets now. This fact frightened the officers so much they could not stop themselves from talking about it, as if by repeating the absurdity of it they could prove to themselves that it was not true.

I did not want to go to Harrow Cross. I wanted to be free again. But though things were changing and the discipline of the Line was not what it once was, its officers could not be bribed to let me go. They just ignored all my offers.

They helped me out of the back of the motor-car and as they helped me to stand I opened my mouth to make one last attempt to bribe or cozen them but the noise and stench and hugeness of the Station took my words from me. They said, "This way sir," and they moved me from the motor-car bays of the Station's Arch Six up through a maze of corridors and elevators to a tower-top apartment, taller by far than Mr. Baxter's pent house, from which I could look down from high windows into many-layered canyons of black metal, all the way down to the depths where I cannot think any daylight ever reached- the darkness crawled with what I think were men and women and machines.

Officially the story was that I remained the head of the Baxter-Ransom Trust, and that I had been removed from Jasper City to Harrow Cross only so that I could be given the finest medical treatments available, after the injuries I sustained in the cowardly and underhanded and unsuccessful &c attack, in which I had bravely though unnecessarily stood between the a.s.sa.s.sin's bullet and the Kingstown Engine.

It was true that I had been injured. It was weeks before I regained the use of my right arm, and months before it was strong again, and I still have some pain in it. I had to learn to write my correspondence with my left hand.

My leg was not quick to heal either- I blame it on the bad air of Harrow Cross, and my conditions of confinement. For months I was stuck in a Wheelchair. This was a heavy contraption of metal and hard black rubber, a noisy rattling menace. It was never under any circ.u.mstances comfortable, like a device constructed for the self-mortification of an old-country Saint. Its wheels constantly threatened to sever wayward fingers, and once it started rolling sometimes the brakes could barely stop it and I was a danger to myself and anyone in my path. An adjutant was a.s.signed to push me. This one was a woman, and she must have been stronger than she looked. I did not ask her name and she did not tell me. She addressed me as Sir, with contempt. Every day like clockwork she pushed me up and down the long electric-lit corridors and elevators and across the expanse of concrete rooftop between my quarters and the laboratories where they were building the Bomb.

In Jasper City I had been a prisoner, but also a dignitary. I'd been the heir to the Baxter Trust, the man in the pent house, a man of many philanthropic enterprises, the wealthiest and most successful fellow for miles around. It was all an illusion, but a powerful one, and often even I thought that it was real. In Harrow Cross they did not play the same game. I was not admired or adored or respected. I was not called on to give speeches to the ma.s.ses. I was not quoted in the newspapers- there were no newspapers. In Harrow Cross there were no Great Men. They were beyond such notions. My job was to advise on the construction of the Bomb. That was all.

Truth is I had little to do with it. I had delayed and prevaricated and fed my captors false information for as long as I could, but bit by bit I had let slip too much of the truth, and now the engineers of the Line hardly needed me at all. The project was gathering its own momentum. Tests took place and the results were reported to me in the form of a rapidly upward-rising line on a chart pinned to the wall of the laboratory. The engineers were eager but silent young men who never questioned what they were doing. They talked over my head. They looked forward with quiet pride to the moment when they would win the approval of the Engines, when the Bomb was ready to be used against their enemies.

When the phantoms started appearing again I was pleased to have somebody to talk to, even if they never talked back, just stood there looking stiff and wide-eyed and open-mouthed with alarm.

If you have never been in a Station of the Line you probably imagine that every moment in a Station is spent in the presence of the Engines. They are so immense- how could you not live in their shadow? Well, they are immense but their Stations are bigger. Truth is I rarely set eyes on one of the Engines while I was held in Harrow Cross. Sometimes I saw their smoke as they approached or departed across the plains. Sometimes I felt their vibrations through the floor or in my gut. Sometimes I got telegrams from the Engines themselves, full of bl.u.s.ter and menace: ransom. we expect progress.

ransom. do not fail us.

ransom. we elevated you. is this how you repay us? explain yourself ransom.

Everyone told me this was a great honor but I did not enjoy it. Once and only once I replied. dear engines. a proposal. purpose of bomb is to destroy the demons of the gun. we have no demons to experiment on. no complaint intended but none have been captured for us. great obstacle to research. however any spirit will do, & there are still a great many engines in the world. perhaps 1 or 2 volunteers could be spared as experimental subjects?

That resulted in a storm of telegrams condemning my blasphemy and making threats of terrible tortures and I would like to say that did not scare me but truth is it did.

I got telegrams from just about all of the Engines but most often from the Kingstown Engine, until I began to feel that we had a kind of connection, me and It, that we had been through difficult times together, back in the swamp and in Jasper City, and that a bond of adversity had been forged. There were times when I wanted to please it.

I guess you would also imagine that in Harrow Cross every secret is top secret and nothing happens without the Engines knowing of it, not a word is whispered, not a sparrow flies without it being noted and logged somewhere in the cold recesses of the Engines' minds. Well it is true that no sparrow flies there, but that is on account of the smoke and the noise. It is not true that there are no secrets. In fact Harrow Cross contains so many files and spies and so much information that it cannot be contained. It spills out. It falls through the cracks. The Engines banned loose talk- they required all mail to be censored- they forbade whispering and gossip and gatherings of more than four persons other than on official business- but when everything is forbidden nothing is forbidden. I am not the first to say that the Gun and the Line are more alike in some ways than they pretend.

I should have had access only to those files that I needed for my researches- that wasn't how it was. There were so many files! They had to go somewhere. An error of a single digit on a requisition form was the difference between experimental observations regarding the aftermath of the white rock incident and report on the communications capacity of the red republic- an error of a single digit on a routing order was the difference between sending some preliminary predictions on the expected growth of the rim economies to me or to whoever's business it rightly was. The Ether was thick with telegraph-messages just like the air was thick with smoke, and no wonder that often they ran afoul of each other, so that the wrong man was sent to the front, or projects begun or ended for no obvious reason. Anyhow it is on account of this tendency toward error that I know so much about the population of Melville City and the history of Jasper City and about banned books and the exploits of Jim Dark and how motor-cars and Injunctions work and a hundred other things. I guess if I had to describe Harrow Cross, that is how I would describe it. I did not get out into the streets a whole lot and I never set foot in a factory. Harrow Cross was a deluge of numbers and orders and words and facts.

News of the War was forbidden in Harrow Cross, except for the maddening deafening moving-pictures stories of triumph that played in monumental black-and-white on the walls of the Station's towers and fortifications. The moving-pictures are sporting, I think- they tell you from the start that everything in them is a lie, because no ordinary soldier of Line has ever been so tall or so square-jawed or handsome as those ten-foot-high faces on the walls. But I heard the truth anyhow, or fragments of it. The engineers whispered. I heard conversation in the halls. Even the adjutant could not keep her mouth shut. I heard about the siege of Juniper, and how the mercenaries of the Gun broke it. I heard the news about the Collier Hill and Arkeley Engines and how they were both removed from the world in the s.p.a.ce of one day, when they confronted the forces of the Republic- the real thing that time. I heard about the defeat of the Line's armies at Chatillon no more than three or four weeks after everybody else in the world. I heard about how after the battle of Chatillon Dr. Lysvet Alverhuysen was no longer First Speaker of the Republic, though I heard a lot of different information as to whether she had stepped down, or been voted down, or shot, or got religion and gone to work in a mission hospital out on the Rim.

Anyhow I'd been in Harrow Cross for maybe a month when I got the first letter from Adela.

I was working in the laboratory. By that I mean that I was sitting in my chair in a shadowed corner watching engineers strut back and forth, shouting out numbers and waving their hands and b.u.mping into phantom images of themselves, which were also waving their hands, though not shouting.

The laboratory was built in a hangar, constructed on one of the rooftops high over the Station. It was windowless, and so huge that one of the prototypes could explode and it would not shake the walls or dislodge the electric-lights from the ceiling. It was bone-white and gunmetal-gray and the floor was tiled in the same kind of discomforting grid as the floor of the big office where I had first met Mr. Baxter.

The adjutant had left me alone. Two of the engineers came to me to ask me to resolve a dispute over the nature of the Process and I answered them without thinking or looking up at them. Another presented me with a series of notes and observations regarding a test that had been conducted at Black Lake- disappointing to them and delightful to me- the prototype had burned down a barn but done nothing else. A third engineer slipped a piece of paper into my hand and walked quickly away, and I could not turn the heavy chair fast enough to see his face.

Harry. I hope this note finds you. I am so sorry. If they tell me this gets to you I shall write again. If you do not want to read anything I write at all I will understand but I will write regardless. -A.

But no more letters came from her for two weeks. I got angry with her and then hopeful and then sentimental and then angry again- last of all I got sad.

It was the middle of the afternoon. Three of the engineers stood with their backs to me, a row of black coats and folded arms. One was a woman. I do not know her name. Their attention was fixed on a prototype of the Apparatus, the wheels of which were turning and turning and turning, its light casting shadows in which all kinds of phantoms big and small could be seen.

The engineers talked amongst themselves. They paid no attention to me, and I paid little enough attention to them. I sat in my chair thinking about Adela and getting sad. I was thinking about how I would surely never hear from her again, and I was thinking about how maybe she did what she did because of me- how if only I had saved the piano, she might not have been driven to that extremity that caused her to shoot Mr. Baxter. Maybe.

One of the engineers said "Won't work."

"It was promising," said another.

"Dead end."

"Easy for you to say. Your team's working with the new data."

"They've got new data? What data?"

"Hush-hush. The latest raid. They brought back a half-ton of junk and the code-crackers have been at work on it- promising new leads."

"Huh. Not fair, if you ask me- why hasn't my team seen that data?"

"Strings. It's all about what strings get pulled."